Long Bay Read online

  ELEANOR LIMPRECHT

  LONG BAY

  About Untapped

  Most Australian books ever written have fallen out of print and become unavailable for purchase or loan from libraries. This includes important local and national histories, biographies and memoirs, beloved children’s titles, and even winners of glittering literary prizes such as the Miles Franklin Literary Award.

  Supported by funding from state and territory libraries, philanthropists and the Australian Research Council, Untapped is identifying Australia’s culturally important lost books, digitising them, and promoting them to new generations of readers. As well as providing access to lost books and a new source of revenue for their writers, the Untapped collaboration is supporting new research into the economic value of authors’ reversion rights and book promotion by libraries, and the relationship between library lending and digital book sales. The results will feed into public policy discussions about how we can better support Australian authors, readers and culture.

  See untapped.org.au for more information, including a full list of project partners and rediscovered books.

  Readers are reminded that these books are products of their time. Some may contain language or reflect views that might now be found offensive or inappropriate.

  For Simon

  15.12.1909

  The Medical Superintendent

  The Royal Hospital for Women, Paddington

  Madam,

  According to arrangements made, an inmate of the Reformatory named Rebecca Sinclair (under sentence of three years’ Hard Labour) is being transferred to your Hospital for the purpose of being Confined. I would also point out that as the woman is under sentence she must not leave your institution. She is to be returned to the State Reformatory after her accouchement. If you would be good enough to inform me when the woman is fit to be returned to the Reformatory, an officer would be sent to your Hospital to take charge of the woman and bring her back.

  Your desire that the officer bringing the woman to your Hospital should be in plain clothes has been attended to.

  I have the honour to be

  Madam

  Your obedient Servant,

  Wm Urquhart Sr

  PROLOGUE

  The pains wake her at dawn. Her belly grows hard with them, and her back aches. Last night she dreamt of a nozzle, syringe and some pessaries from the chemist on Oxford Street. Pain like a stab to the gut. She wakes, her nightdress cold with sweat, shivering. Thinking, I cannot be fit.

  Scared to sleep again, she watches daylight enter the long, high-ceilinged room. It illuminates the scrubbed white walls and the hard floor with coconut matting down the centre. The windows between the beds are hung with thin curtains that do little to keep the light from entering. As the other patients wake she hears dull coughs, bodies turning in crisp sheets. On one side a woman snores. She has grey hair. This will be her eighth child. All of her others were born at home, the seventh with his cord around his neck. The midwife, she said, was too slow to unwrap it. Her only son died before he could take a breath. She will have this baby in hospital, hoping it survives. From the other side comes the click of beads as the Catholic mother whispers her rosaries.

  She is young. This is her first child.

  Rebecca hears nurses’ heels, rustling skirts, the cut glass voice of the doctor. In this long room washed with daylight there are nine other women with her, each of them preparing to give birth. This is the Lady Renwick Ward, though there are few ladies here. The patients are all poor, for the hospital is run by the Benevolent Society. There are women on the ward who are married and many who are not. Some who are having their first and some who insist this will be their last. Still, she is the one they all speak of when they think she cannot hear. She is the only one chained to the bed.

  The tram brought her here two weeks ago, the prison tram as far as Darlinghurst Gaol, then a Black Maria. She wore her pale blue coarse prison dress, extra panels stitched to make room for her belly, a winged white bonnet and starched apron. She knew better than to meet anyone’s eyes.

  She pulls the string for the nurses’ bell.

  ‘Only call if you really need attention. Our nurses are very busy,’ the head matron had said on the first morning. She had eyes as sharp as a magpie’s, and a cap starched to sharp points above her ears. The loose skin of her chin hung over the white collar.

  Sister Planchett comes at the bell, rheumy eyes watering in the bright room. ‘Morning, dear. You look pale. Will I bring your toast and tea?’

  ‘I think it’s starting, Sister,’ she says, trying to sound calm.

  ‘I’ll get the doctor to visit on his rounds,’ Sister says. ‘Perhaps some morphine will help. Or a vial of ether.’ She picks up the chamber pot to empty. ‘Do you want to get up? Sometimes it helps to walk around.’

  ‘I would, please.’

  The sister replaces the pot and pulls the blankets back, exposing the iron holding Rebecca’s ankle to the bed frame. It is just a single chain, riveted to a shackle on her left ankle. The sister unlocks the padlock and pries the shackle open so that she can slip the swollen ankle out. There are marks where it has chafed against her skin. The sister mutters beneath her breath. Rebecca is slow to shift from the bed. Leaning on the sister, she takes tentative steps, pausing to breathe. The young Catholic mother pretends to be absorbed in the baby clothes she embroiders, but the grey-haired woman, Lillian, looks up from her pillow and smiles, showing a mouth of broken and missing teeth. ‘Is it time?’ she asks.

  ‘It seems to be.’

  ‘I wish it were mine.’

  Rebecca walks slowly, hanging off the sister, who smells of kerosene and wool. Between the spasms, when she cannot move or speak, she wants to ask why it was that Sister Planchett joined the order, what kept her from wanting to marry. Perhaps it was fear of this, childbirth, where one must defy death to bring life.

  When she had Ellen she was stronger—in body and mind. Now her stomach has turned to a fist, and it is pulling her towards the earth. Another contraction takes hold. They walk for a while, perhaps an hour. The pains are coming closer together. They are all she can think of; she cannot even breathe. Then a spasm and a gush down her legs, on the floor. She slips, smelling hay. Sister Planchett calls for help. They lift Rebecca to her bed.

  A cloth to her face, the sharp sweet ether smell, and the walls turn green, yellow, deepest red. Time passes. Heart in her ears. In her mind’s eye, she sees the woman laid out on the sofa, poor Lucy, and the stain that has soaked her skirts. Don’s hard eyes turning towards her.

  She thinks: I won’t survive; it is God’s will. How can I even hope? She feels numb, no sense of the life slipping out. Away from her. It will be soft, rotting already, this child. Like the fruit that was thrown at her. Like those small, slippery bodies she buried. A sting between her legs. She remembers the crowds in the court, crow-like women, leering men, shouting:

  Murderer.

  Whore.

  The voice of cut glass, a cluster of heads, a sudden slackness. Then dark. Bottomless dark, blacker than any well.

  Part One

  CHAPTER 1

  Her first memories are fragments only, scraps of fabric pieced together to make a whole.

  Father in the big bed, skin clammy and cold, whiskers wild, and mother wants her to kiss him. She runs and hides beneath the cane chair as weeping fills the room.

  Her mother’s frayed black dress and bonnet. Violet, Helen, Louis, Amy and Rebecca round her legs and Ruby squalling in her arms. Men lower a long wooden box into a deep hole in the grass, among stones, and she wonders what might be inside—a doll, perhaps, or nice things to eat.

&
nbsp; In the bed with her sisters, she is awake and crying, for she dreamt of a piece of bread and treacle and when she woke it was gone, her hands not even sticky, emptiness in her aching stomach. And Helen puts her arms round her and sings:

  And it’s home, dearie, home, oh, it’s home I want to be.

  My topsails are hoisted, and I must out to sea,

  For the oak, and the ash, and the bonny birch tree,

  They’re all growin’ green in the North-country;

  With Helen behind, and Violet and Amy in front, she is warmed by their bodies, by their breath and their small hands.

  Then visitors arrive—women with sour faces checking that the girls’ hands are clean and that the cupboards of the house are indeed bare. And her mother saying, ‘I’ll do what I can to keep them.’ Women who will not look at her, just at their shoes and the door, the tall one with a handkerchief to her face as though she cannot bear the smell of their lack.

  Queuing for rations with the crowds at the Benevolent Society on Elizabeth Street. When it is finally their turn, the way her stomach quakes from just smelling bread, meat already beginning to turn, sugar and flour and tea. They rush home and cook the meat before it goes off, for there would be no greater waste than that maggots eat the meat.

  Ration day there is bread with sugar, and meat, and stews, and then at the end of the week it is stale bread soaked in tea, spread with dripping, what is left of the stew made thick with flour.

  ‘It fills the belly,’ her mother says, but how she moans, how they all moan. All but Ruby.

  Then the man in shiny boots at their door—Mrs Perkins next-door sent him—looking for outworkers, and her mother takes all he will give her.

  Every Monday he brings orders and picks up the ones from last week, and there are always 10 or 15 shillings, hardly enough to pay the rent, but it has to do. And that is when it begins—the sewing—and that is what carries through.

  Her life becomes run through with stitches. Stitches tiny and neat. Bent over a piece of linen—no more than five or six years old—stabbing the needle in and out. Line after line until her mother is happy with her work. Until she can be trusted with the simple seams. Amy and Rebecca stitching, Helen cutting, Violet doing buttons. Ruby is of no use; she is tied to the sewing table leg with a cord, playing with wooden spools, speaking her secret language of grunt and gurgle.

  Knots hidden, no loose threads. Hands clean, for if the fabric is marked Shiny Boots deducts a shilling. Her eyes water and burn, but she stitches until the lamp gutters and dinner grows cold.

  ‘You’ll be glad to know this skill,’ their mother Lizzie says, pins in her mouth, bent over the Singer that the charity women brought. A charity, they said, for ‘gentlewomen in distress.’ Lizzie bit her tongue so as not to laugh at those words but the machine is the nicest thing they own, and easily the most valuable.

  For rooms, they let the bottom storey of a sunless terrace in Paddington—two rooms for the seven of them. The floor is worn and splintered and the walls layered with newsprint, each picture so familiar it has become a part of her life. In the front room they work and take visitors; in the back room they cook and sleep. Not long after the sewing starts Helen grows ill with a cough that will not shift, and the whole bed quakes at night. Lizzie moves the rest of them to the floor, in case they catch the fevers that make Helen sweat and shake. The doctor just gives her a drop from a dark bottle to ease her pain, and says there is nothing more to be done.

  It takes her elsewhere, the drop. But elsewhere from that dark, deathly room is a better place to be. When she dies, Rebecca is given her shoes and dress. The neighbours help pay for the burial, not wanting a pauper’s funeral for a dead child. She is laid out in the front room and the neighbours all visit, to pay their respects. Rebecca does not want to look but does. ‘Go on—touch her,’ a neighbour says. It is not her sister anymore, that cold lizard skin.

  The sewing keeps on but they go to school some hours in the day. Ruby stays home, of course—no use teaching her anything. Lizzie could keep the rest of them home, being a widow, but she says they must go. They are not the worst off. They have patched shoes, and a mother who makes them scrub their hands, faces and necks each morning. Nits are combed out and doused in kerosene each night.

  Before their father died they lived in a whole terrace on their own, with new clothes at Christmas and a girl who did the washing on Wednesdays. Now, they still have the manners that Lizzie insists are part of a proper upbringing, but not the right to hold them. At school they are teased for putting on airs. Rebecca feels as though she lives between worlds, for there is no place she belongs.

  Louis comes home some afternoons with his trousers and shirt torn and stained, a fat lip or grazed cheek from scuffles in the schoolyard. But Lizzie is never cross with Louis; she says he is the man around the house now. He is the one who—as soon as he is old enough—will make enough to support them.

  They keep doing outwork but Lizzie soon has women who come, having heard of her fine stitching. They are ladies, and want their dresses made to order. They come, cabs waiting on the street, their small, buttoned boots crossed at the ankle as they sit on the couch in the front room. Lizzie with dark patches of sweat down her dress, hurrying Rebecca or Violet to make tea—never the chipped cup—always swirling boiled water in the pot first to take away the chill.

  The ladies show pictures cut from the newspaper, or tell stories of another woman’s dress they envy, fingers fluttering at bosoms to show a cut, sweeping in and then out at the hips. Lizzie fetches her stub of pencil and paper, then sketches an image of her own, rubs parts out, corrects it. When they leave they slip coins into her palm with promises of more. Those are the weeks they have to work twice as hard, late into the night stitching ladies’ frocks, and maintaining the outwork too. Rebecca fights to keep her eyes open at school those weeks but at tea she can eat her fill.

  At fourteen they are done with school. Louis first then Amy, Violet and Rebecca. The rest of them were thrilled, but when the final day comes Rebecca does not want to leave. The last morning she sits at the front of the class, as she always does, waiting for the results for the Merit Certificate.

  ‘You surprised me,’ the teacher says to her. ‘You got the highest marks in the class on exams. 170/180.’

  The teacher does not say anything more but slaps the wooden ruler on the desk. The students are shifting in their seats, watching. There is the drone of blowflies and the sound of pencil scraping slate. That afternoon Rebecca walks out of the school gates, pinching herself to keep real tears from coming. She imagined somehow that her marks would be worth something – that her teacher would ask her to sit for exams to enter secondary school—but he merely expected her to leave, to graduate from a working-class girl to a working-class woman.

  Violet finds work as a seamstress in a clothing factory. More slops, of course, but they have each girl just do the same piece of clothing, over and over: the collar, the hem, the sleeve.

  ‘They wouldn’t want us to learn how to make anything useful on our own,’ Violet says, and Lizzie hushes her. It is not the work that is a worry so much as the kind of girls that Violet starts keeping company with, and the words that come from her mouth now—the roughness.

  Louis should be working too, helping with the rent. Instead, he gambles at the two-up school and marks pakapu tickets. He sometimes slips money to Lizzie, and boiled lollies to the rest of them.

  From sewing there are small distractions: the parades at Federation, the fuss over women gaining the right to vote. When the election comes, Lizzie stays home to finish a dress rather than join the others at the polling booth. ‘Some things are more important than politics,’ she says to her daughters. ‘Like finishing my work on time so we can eat.’

  Lizzie’s sight is fading, so she fails to notice how her daughters grow. She gives them each a bundle of clean rags when they start to bleed,
but there is no talk of what it means, or what to avoid. Only here’s where to soak them, beneath the kitchen steps, hidden from common view.

  Violet, with her ginger hair always coming loose and skin so pale it’s blue—Violet is the restless one. At nights she waits until Lizzie sleeps and then slips from the bed that the girls share. She greases the hinge of the front door with lard so that it doesn’t squeak when she slips out into the night.

  Rebecca has always known that there would be a morning when she would wake and Violet would still be gone. But when that morning comes, her chest feels as though it has been pierced by the needle of the Singer—not once, but with the pedal held down—a hundred thousand times. Heart pierced, she cannot deny a sense of secret thrill. One day it will be her turn to leave.

  Then it is just three of them, for Ruby is no use. The only job they can give her is taking apart old garments, and even then she rents the fabric, rips a seam rather than cutting the stitches one by one.

  Violet returns a few weeks later, not to stay but to bring money. She is dressed in pink and green, china crepe with broad stripes, her hair falling round her shoulders.

  Lizzie shakes her head and pushes the coins away. ‘It’s sinful money, Violet. You’ll be in gaol or dead next. Come home, before it’s too late.’

  Violet stamps her foot, showing a new, high-heeled boot. ‘I’m just making something to live on. Free to do as I please, I’m a grown woman now.’

  ‘You may be grown,’ Lizzie says, ‘but you’re not free.’

  CHAPTER 2

  A year after Violet leaves, a scarred block of a man comes calling. He is looking for their father, he says: they sailed together long ago. Lizzie meets him at the door, ‘I hope he didn’t owe you any money,’ she says. ‘He’s been dead nearly thirteen year.’